that is to say in my understanding, by which sight I saw he is in al thing.’ ‘He was
hanging up in the air as men hang a cloth for to dry.’ The flesh under the thorns
was ‘rumpled, with a tawny colour, like a dry board’. Christ tells her that the wound
in his right side is ‘large enough for all mankynd that shall be saved to rest in peace
and love’. He also tells her ‘that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner
of thing shall be well’. Of Christ’s compassion she writes: ‘Each kinde compassion
that man hath on his even-Cristen [fellow-Christian] with charite, it is Christ in
hym. His love excuseth us; and of his great courtesy he doth away all our blame
and beholdeth us with ruth and pity as children innocent and unlothfulle [impos-
sible to hate].’ Christ explains: ‘I it am, I it am. I it am that is highest. I it am that
thou lovest. I it am that thou likest, I it am that thou servest. I it am that thou
longest. I it am that thou desirest. I it am that thou meanest. I it am that is all.’ And
‘Our life is all grounded and rotyd [rooted] in love, and without love we may not
live.’
These brief extracts indicate Julian’s focus on central Christian teachings and the
purity of her style; but not the richness of the Showings, nor of her meditations in
the mystical tradition of the Bible from Augustine to Bernard. Among other women
mystics of the 14th century was St Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373).
The Bohemian reformer John Hus said that John Wyclif(c.1330–1384) translated
all the Bible into English, but no extant English text is now ascribed to this Oxford
theologian. (The first English Vulgate produced by his followers is unreadably literal;
a second is more comprehensible.) It was not the first Bible in English – there are
Old English versions. But before lay literacy, the Word could not be spread except by
mouth, which was the role of the Church.
Wyclif ’s attacks on Church abuses won support, but his denial of the Real
Pr esence of Christ in the Eucharist was heresy; his followers, known as Lollards, were
repressed, and his own polemics suppressed. Wyclif was a reformer, not a writer of
English. The Bible his followers produced lacks the qualities which made Luther’s
version the exe mplar of modern German.Secular prose
Since the end of the Peterborough Chroniclein 1154,English secular prose – non-
religious prose – had been used for practical matters, but in Richard II’s reign
English came into general use.John Trevisatranslated a French encyclopedia and a
Latin world history; adding that, as grammar-school teaching was now (1385) in
English rather than in French, children ‘know no more French than does their left
heel’.
The Sir John Mandevillewho wrote his Travels at this time may have been as
fictional as most of his stories. Although he claims as his own experiences the trav-
ellers’ tales he translated from French, he advances his more exotic claims with a
disarming hesitancy. The chief ‘travels’ are to the Holy Land, thrice visited by
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, twice by St Godric, and once by Margery Kempe. Margery
(c.1373–c.1440), a King’s Lynn housewife, dictated The Book of Margery Kempe,
revising it in 1436. In a mental crisis after the birth of the first of her fourteen chil-
dren, she had a religious conversion; her confessional testament is fascinating and
artless.The Paston Letters, the correspondence of a 15th-century Norfolk family,
have a similar human and social history interest.50 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500